


Loose and Run

by disparity



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 13:12:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7053163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disparity/pseuds/disparity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lavellan gave everything to the Inquisition, and he only asked one thing in return: <em>Do not follow me.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Loose and Run

Lavellan made five mistakes.

The first was made at age fourteen, when he was just a spindly little thing, all limbs and blonde braids. He'd killed two humans who wandered too close to camp, stuck an arrow through each of them with a grin. The mistake wasn't killing them—the shemlen bathed in the blood of his people, and this was the least measure of what their kind deserved—the mistake was telling Mahlia. Beautiful Mahlia with her red curls and her books, telling all kinds of stories about dragons and castles and kings by the firelight. Battle and romance with some ethereal quality on paper that didn't translate to real life, and Lavellan learned the hard way.

Mahlia was too good; Lavellan should've noticed, but he didn't. He thought stolen kisses and promises whispered by the river where no one would overhear meant that all his secrets were safe. But it wasn't like that—it wasn't a trade, kisses for integrity. Mahlia couldn't sacrifice compassion or honesty because she was too good to know how.

At first, Lavellan was angry at Mahlia for telling his secret to the Keeper. Then he was angry at the Keeper for punishing him. Then he was angry at himself for expecting Mahlia to be something she wasn't.

The second mistake was not a single action but a series of them. Lavellan couldn't pinpoint exactly where it had begun or when it ended; but if he had to choose just one moment that defined this series of errors, he knew the one. Sometimes he still saw it when he closed his eyes, wincing at the sharp edges of the memory, not dulled at all despite the distance.

His mother's face peering through the branches, disapproving frown fractured by red-and-gold leaves. _You can't stay up there forever, da'len_ , but that only made him more determined. _Enough of this foolishness. You're not a child anymore._ It was nothing he hadn't heard, and he couldn't say why it hurt so much that time, but it did.

 _Not a child_ , because he wasn't, was he? Childhood was a lost era, and he clung to it like he clung to the branches of that tree, willful and white-knuckled. His past could be excused if he just let go, if he gave in and grew up and let the clan dismiss the mistakes of his youth as naivety. But he didn't like that, didn't like the thought of being washed away like a speck of dirt, coming back all clean and ready to be made into something else.

He spent too many years holding on, refusing to change, before he figured out that he'd been doing it all along.

Lavellan did grow up. He didn't do it right, and his growing pains left scars behind, but he reached maturity like all boys do and learned to navigate adulthood. He calmed down, reacted less rashly. Most importantly, he learned how to hide, and he found it far superior to running.

When the Keeper needed someone to spy on the shems, she picked Lavellan. It was a stroke of genius, even if it took a devastating explosion courtesy of an ancient darkspawn magister for Lavellan to realize that this was exactly where he ought to be: surrounded by enemies.

Lavellan's third mistake was allowing Cassandra Pentaghast to live. It was a mistake he made a thousand times over, and every one of them was a sharp _ping_ in his mind. One after another, _ping ping ping,_ until he had to nock fifty arrows and let them fly just to think about something else, anything else. They sunk into nugs and fennecs outside the walls of Haven, deaths of no consequence except for what they made him.

 _Ping,_ when he looted that first bow from a still-warm corpse, nocked the first arrow and hesitated before he aimed. _Ping_ , when he retrieved templar arrows from mage corpses in the Hinterlands and thought maybe no one would notice if a stray shot came from the wrong direction. _Ping_ , every time he picked out that raven head of hair bobbing along as he sat atop Skyhold's walls, nestled up in the battlements, too high to be seen.

There were excuses. _I can't, not yet, too risky._ They were good reasons, but Lavellan knew the truth: Cassandra was a rare woman, and he a sentimental fool. She was everything he hated about shemlen—she held the same fierce faith that razed his people to the ground—but he couldn't stand to remove such courage and beauty from the world.

He paid for it, in the end. She became everything he knew she would, and a thousand times he chose not to stop it.

The fourth mistake was a sword lifted in the air, the undertaking of a grand title and everything that came with it. Before, he'd only considered power in an intimate sense—the strength of his grip, the will to survive—anything more was the stuff of shemlen, and he wanted nothing to do with it. He was a lone wolf, a solitary man in a world that only wanted him for what it thought he was, even if it was a lie.

People wanted to believe in a lie, and he let them. It wasn't so difficult, at first. He evaded the adulation and delegated everything to advisors and companions, became a silent figurehead of tall tales and legends. But he hated himself every day for letting them believe, and every day, it was a little harder to ignore.

He took his hatred out on other things. He snapped at his mismatched inner circle and shed blood at the slightest provocation and threw himself into physical training. He was stronger, deadlier than he'd ever been, and it wasn't enough. There were still thousands of people dying in his name, _living_ in his name, and even if it was all to save the world, it wasn't worth what it made him into.

Lavellan became what he reviled. He pushed everyone around him because he needed someone to tell him _no_.

His fifth mistake, the last of his defining errors, was a wrong turn. He was still recovering from the final battle, foregoing the celebrations in favor of wandering around Skyhold in wine-soaked melancholy, saying his last goodbyes to the place. He was going to sneak out during the revelry, a hastily-penned letter left upon his desk so they'd know not to follow, but instead he'd gotten quite marvelously drunk for some forgotten reason.

He wasn't entirely sure of his current whereabouts when he turned that corner, but he since he wasn't going anywhere in particular, it didn't matter. What mattered was the man he found in the corridor, another elf, a servant of some sort. There was a name, somewhere, but he missed it in between a bottle of suspicious wine retrieved from the cellar and an idle but surprisingly pleasant conversation about harts, of all things.

Drifting off to sleep with his arm slung lazily across a pale, lean chest, Lavellan wanted to stay. He wanted allies, wanted purpose, wanted a beautiful elf in his bed every day for the rest of his life. It was a brief, half-dazed moment on the edge of sleep, but the memory of wanting was like a burning ache that followed him out of his quarters the next morning, followed him through the courtyard and beyond the walls of Skyhold on the bare soles of his feet.

The Inquisition was never less than necessary, and it was never anything more until that night. Months of seeing through one impossible task after another, of waking up every day expected to be nothing short of extraordinary—and never once had he doubted that the Inquisition was a setback, a thing to be endured. He _had_ endured, and now it was finished.

 _I have done enough_. They were the last words of a letter that sat atop an antique wooden desk in a lavishly decorated room that was never his. _Do not follow me. Do not look for me. I will kill any who bear an Inquisition banner on sight._ A few hours from now, at best, a nameless lover would wake and see it sitting on his desk. Perhaps his curiosity would get the better of him, and perhaps it would not; either way, the letter would be in Leliana's hands by the end of the day. She, at least, had always seen him for what he was.

He'd never belonged to anything; he wasn't made for it. But Lavellan would always remember the one time he came close, the time he _wanted_ to. The last mistake that reminded him who he was: a man with the power to hold fate in his hands, who chose to let it go.

The world wouldn't see it that way, but he didn't need it to. He didn't carry it anymore.

 


End file.
